A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

by Brian Zahnd

My claim, which I’m told is audacious by some and naive by others, is simply this: Jesus Christ and his peaceable kingdom are the hope of the world.

@brianzahnd

Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.

Of course Constantinian Christianity couldn’t quite get away with simply dismissing Christ himself, so he was given the reduced role of saving souls and presiding over a religion of private piety. This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.

The Sanhedrin had made its choice: they wanted a violent messiah, not a peaceful messiah.

Isn’t it time we were converted and became as children, having the capacity to imagine the radical otherness of the kingdom of God?

Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world. The divine vision and original intention for human society is not to be abandoned, but saved. That’s a big deal! It’s the gospel! And it makes me happy! But this hasn’t always been the way I understood the gospel. As a zealous American evangelical, I spent plenty of time peddling “the bus ride to heaven” reduced version of the gospel. I can tell you it’s a pretty easy sell. You promise the moon (actually heaven) for the low one-time cost of a sinner’s prayer. How hard is that? And since it mostly applies to the next life, why wouldn’t you pray the prayer? If for no other reason than as a kind of afterlife insurance. Oh, yes, we did offer the optional discipleship package for those wanting to upgrade their Christian experience. But the important thing was to fill up the bus for the postmortem ride to heaven. That’s largely how I understood and preached the gospel. And, yes, at times it did seem a little cheap. But plenty of people made decisions and prayed the prayer. As the saying goes, you can’t argue with the numbers. (Actually you can argue with the numbers—that’s what prophets do all the time.)

more Zahnd thoughts

This is the gospel! This is the apostolic gospel, and it’s a gospel that gives us an eschatology of hope. By eschatology of hope, I mean a Christian vision for the future that is redemptive and not destructive—more anticipating the New Jerusalem and less obsessed with Armageddon.

But precisely because of the enormity of the Holocaust experience, Fackenheim tells his fellow Jews they must now add one more law to their ancient Torah—a 614th commandment. Commandment 614 is simply this: Thou shalt not give Hitler any posthumous victories. Elaborating on the 614th Commandment, Fackenheim says, “We are forbidden to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted.”1 Fackenheim was saying to his own Jewish community that even in the face of the Holocaust, they are not permitted to give up on the world; despite all the atrocities, they must continue to believe that a horribly broken world can be repaired. Fackenheim rightly insists that this world is to be the kingdom of God and to despair of this is to collude with wickedness and give vanquished pathogens of evil posthumous victories.

hope as the antidote to atrocity

Christianity’s first apostles evangelized, not by trying to sign people up for an apocalyptic evacuation, but by announcing the arrival of a new world order. The apostles understood the kingdom of God as a new arrangement of human society where Jesus is the world’s true King. Put simply: because Jesus is Lord, the world is to be redeemed and not left in ruin.

We rethink our lives (which is what it means to repent) not so we can escape a doomed planet, but in order to participate in God’s design to redeem the human person and renovate human society in Christ. Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project!

Humanity’s worst sins and most heinous crimes occur when we follow the way of Cain as the founder of human civilization and refuse to recognize the shared humanity of our brothers and fail to acknowledge our responsibility to be our brother’s keeper. When vicious competition and blind commitment to tribalism become more valued than the brotherhood of shared humanity, we let Satan loose in our midst. When we denigrate those of differing nationalities, ethnicities, religions, politics, and classes to a dehumanized “them,” we open the door to deep hostility and the potential for unimaginable atrocities. If we believe the lie that they are “not like us,” we are capable of becoming murderers and monsters. And it’s been going on for a long, long time.

The incarnation has, without question, made the world a more humane place by raising the dignity of every individual.

The practice of blaming is given a place to die in Jesus. Jesus carried our blame down to Hades—where it belongs—and left it there. Jesus became the final scapegoat. The innocent one, suffering, praying from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34 ESV). And Jesus was telling the truth from the cross—we do not know what we are doing when we blame the scapegoat. We have been deceived by the crowd, by the satan, by the spirit of fear. So Jesus died for our sins. Jesus died at the hands of humans under the satanic impulse to blame. Jesus died as an innocent victim of the demonic scapegoat system that the crowd always resorts to. And he died with forgiveness on his lips. Jesus took the blame to do away with blaming. Jesus bore the accusation to do away with accusing. Jesus became the scapegoat banished to the wilderness of death. But then something new happened. The banished scapegoat came back! Three days later Jesus was vindicated by God the Father in resurrection! But in his return from the wilderness of death, Jesus did not speak of revenge; instead he spoke of peace and forgiveness. (See John 20:19–23.) Yes, Jesus forgives us, but he also calls us to forsake the evil practice of turning people into scapegoats.

War is sacred. It lies beyond critique. To critique it is blasphemy. The crowd hates blasphemy. The crowd wants to kill blasphemers. The crowd knows that the criticism of their violence is blasphemy because they know their cause is just. They believe it. And from their perspective their cause is just. They can prove it. Both sides can prove it. Always.

Believing in a war-waging Messiah is easy. Believing in the Prince of Peace is hard.

Do we Christians secretly wish that Jesus were more like Muhammad? It’s not an idle question. The moment the church took to the Crusades in order to fight Muslims, it had already surrendered its vision of Jesus to the model of Muhammad. Muhammad may have thought freedom could be found at the end of a sword, but Jesus never did. So are Christians who most enthusiastically support US-led wars against Muslim nations actually trying to turn Jesus into some version of Muhammad?

@brianzahnd asks a dangerous question

What happened was once the red, white, and blue varnish was removed from Jesus and I learned to read the Gospels free of a star-spangled interpretation, I discovered that my Lord and Savior had a lot of things to say about peace that I had been missing.

Jesus without varnish

Today there is a tendency to overspiritualize the way Jesus spoke of peace. By making peace primarily a privatized spiritual peace, we are free to carry the banners of war down the road and keep the world as it’s always been—just one more war away from peace. (Now all we have to do is win the “war on terror” and peace will prevail. Call me dubious.)

What had gone wrong? Millions had accepted Jesus and shouted hosanna, but they did not know the things that make for peace. They prayed a sinner’s prayer, “got right with God,” and kept their slaves. They had a faith that would justify the slave owner while bringing no justice to the slave. They had faith that gave them a ticket to heaven and a highway to hell. The religious fervor in the conservative churches of the South only served to convince them that they were blessed by heaven. They were quite certain God smiled upon their deep devotion to their southern-fried Jesus. If they had to go to war to preserve their freedom, so be it—God was on their side.

In seeking to preserve an economy dependent upon slave labor, Southern churches had embraced a fatally distorted faith. Probably without even knowing what they were doing, these Christians had quite effectively used Jesus and the Bible to validate their racist assumptions and protect their vested interests. They went to church on Sunday. They got saved. They loved Jesus. They waved their palms and shouted hosanna on Palm Sunday. But like the crowd in Jerusalem eighteen centuries earlier, they didn’t know the things that made for peace. And Jesus wept over an America headed to hell. The churches were full and slavery continued—until the Civil War, that is. Then 750,000 people died for the sins of America.

The golden rule is the narrow gate. The narrow gate is not a sinner’s prayer; the narrow gate is the practice of the Jesus way. The narrow gate is fulfilling the law and the prophets by empathetic love of neighbor in imitation of Jesus. When we hate and vilify others for ideological reasons, when we demonize and dehumanize others for nationalistic reasons, when we use and exploit others for economic reasons, we are on the highway to hell—we have chosen the well-worn road that leads to war and destruction.

To even suggest that Jesus doesn’t necessarily endorse every aspect of Jeffersonian democracy and laissez-faire capitalism is enough to get you burned at the stake (hopefully only in a metaphorical sense).

there is a sense in which the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ has inaugurated a new justice in the earth, and nations that run headlong against the righteousness of God eventually fall into fiery judgment … now! Whether it’s Imperial Rome or Nazi Germany, nations cannot forever oppose the righteousness of God without falling into a fiery hell “prepared for the devil and his angels.” The American colonies and nation practiced, for over two centuries, the most brutal form of slavery the world has ever known—until it was thrown into the hell of a civil war that claimed the lives of three quarters of a million people.

What does it mean to be a “sheep” nation judged to be on the right side of Jesus and blessed by God? It means to be a nation that cares for the poor, cares for the sick, welcomes the immigrant, and practices humane treatment of its prisoners. We can argue about how this is best to be done, but that these are the priorities of Christ is beyond dispute.

What I saw in the Cadet Chapel was a fusion of iconography—Christian symbols wedded with militaristic emblems. It was Constantine placing Christian symbols on implements of war all over again. Fighter jets forming a house of Christian worship. Mars mashed-up with Jesus. The god of war subsuming the Prince of Peace. That’s what I saw. A cross transformed into a sword. The irony is deep. Originally the Roman cross was a weapon of war.

I am a conscientious objector to the doom-obsessed, hyperviolent, war-must-come, pillage-the-Bible-for-the-worst-we-can-find eschatology of Hal Lindsey and his tribe. We must reject that kind of warmongering misinterpretation of Scripture. Jesus doesn’t call us to give a prophetic interpretation to the latest war and rumor of war. Jesus calls us to be peacemakers and lead the way out of the darkness of retributive violence into the light of Christian reconciliation.

The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia. War is, among other things, impatience.